Microsoft added a bunch of useful capabilities to Excel this month, including one that was highly requested by customers.

The programming language can be used to create more advanced data science workflows than those that Excel supports out of the box.

With LAMBDA, the Excel formula language is Turing-complete. User-defined functions can thus compute anything without resorting to imperative languages (e.g., VBA, JavaScript) ...

Beyond Excel, the team also took inspiration from tools and languages like Pascal, Mathematica and Miranda, a functional programming language developed in the 1980s.

Microsoft researchers are working on a new, future Excel feature that combines natural language and automatic programming technologies to make queries and data analysis easier.